Let’s keep America exceptional

The Fourth of July is America’s greatest national holiday—but it may become a mere footnote on the calendar.

America was founded on Judeo-Christian values, but today many of us hesitate to voice such values lest this or that immigrant group might take offense. Consequently, we have become a ship without a compass, not knowing whence we came or where we are going.

How can a nation that once stunned the world by its superhuman achievements castrate itself into such sheepish timidity where its people now hesitate to celebrate their Judeo-Christian patriotism? The answer is fairly simple—America has turned its back on its founding values. It is an apostasy that is particularly poignant on the Fourth of July.

In fact, creating a national disaffection with traditional American patriotism is the goal of liberals who promote multiculturalism—the view that all cultures are equally relevant and respectable and that there is nothing extraordinary about Western culture. It is a clueless, naïve view of the world. Let me explain.

First, I must point out that I am a naturalized American, an immigrant with the firsthand experience of leaving a Third World culture and, through unabashed assimilation and hard work, living the American Dream. It is that experience, combined with a strong knowledge of world history, that has made me inordinately proud to be an American.

And it is that experience that makes me ask a simple question that exposes the rank naiveté of liberals who promote multiculturalism—if all cultures are equally relevant and there is nothing extraordinary about Western culture, then how come so many cultures so utterly fail to provide opportunities for their people that millions of them have to immigrate to the West to improve their lives?

And as for the equal respectability of cultures, let me cut to the chase—does a culture that is so primitive that its people routinely starve deserve the same praise as one where the people are well-fed, well-clothed, and well-educated? Of course not. Indeed, denying the superiority of the latter culture is tantamount to denying the difference between night and day.

In fact, if all cultures are equally relevant and respectable, then they must be equally capable—yet why is there not a single non-Western culture that indigenously produced a great democracy which continues to attract people from all over the world?

You see, liberals have no honest answers to such questions. The problem is that despite their self-proclaimed intellectual sophistication, liberals are pitifully naïve thinkers who have trouble understanding the real world.

After all, anyone who takes an objective look at the world must admit the undeniable fact that Western cultures happen to be more educated, more civilized, and more democratic than non-Western ones. Yet that simple fact is ignored by liberals in their assertion that no culture is superior to another.

Of course, merely because a culture is primitive does not mean it has no right to exist. No serious conservative would advocate the annihilation of such cultures. Rather, what I and many other opponents of multiculturalism despise is the imaginary and naïve equivalence that liberals draw between non-Western and Western cultures.

Take the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were written by white men from a Judeo-Christian ethos—and the country they founded has become the most egalitarian nation in the world, a refuge for men and women of all races and religions. Despite the liberal claims about the wonderful accomplishments of non-Western cultures, none of those cultures has ever produced a human-rights instrument as powerful as the Declaration or the Constitution.

So, this Fourth of July, we should remind ourselves that ours is a special country—an exceptional country. We are not a perfect country—but we are a much better country than any other.

And that understanding is crucial this election year, when we have a choice between turning our backs on our Founding Fathers and renewing their vision of an exceptional country. In other words, we can either re-elect an administration that is turning America into a pitifully unexceptional place, where we are no better than other countries, which is the worldview of liberal multiculturalists—or we can elect a new administration that would renew the Founders’ vision of a unique country where we believe we can do things better than any other country.